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WASHINGTON—Twenty years ago this month, TV sets in the White House and the State Department were glued to CNN as this largely ignored news channel (then derided as the “Chicken Noodle Network”) brought live pictures of the 1991 Gulf War into American households for the first time.

The country was mesmerized, and U.S. broadcast historians still refer to this as the “CNN Moment” when the world saw the power of live, rolling television news — and discovered CNN.

Twenty years later — this past week — another channel has been filling those screens with riveting and exclusive live pictures and interviews, chronicling the seismic events unfolding in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. It has also been telling a larger, more nuanced story of that region than is currently available to most North Americans.

That channel has been Al Jazeera English (AJE) — the English-language service of a network that is available in 220 million households in more than 100 countries, including Canada, but still not broadcast on TV screens throughout most of the United States.

A notable and significant exception is the Washington, D.C., area, where it is available on local cable systems in 2 million households.

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So this past week, according to several American media accounts, many TV sets in the White House, State Department, Pentagon and throughout much of the nation’s capital were fixated on AJE’s coverage of these historic events, which has received overwhelming praise in U.S. media circles.

This has not gone unnoticed. Traffic to AJE’s live online streaming of its coverage (www.aljazeera.net/english) has increased 2,500 per cent in the past week, with up to 60 per cent of that coming from the U.S.

In that same period, an estimated 7 million Americans have watched 50 million minutes of AJE coverage. In addition, the California-based Link TV, which is seen in more than 33 million American households on the DirecTV and Dish satellite systems, has been broadcasting up to 12 hours of AJE coverage each day.

Al Jazeera has been unique among broadcasters by making its content available to cable and satellite systems worldwide so that potential viewers — particularly in Canada and the U.S. — can decide for themselves whether they want to watch AJE.

For example, in Canada this month, in light of the events in Egypt and the growing public interest in the channel’s news and programming, AJE is being made available in February free-of-charge as a “free preview” to all of its affiliates in Canada.

But will all of this result in a breakthrough — nationwide — in the United States? Will broadcast historians in the future record this as “Al Jazeera’s Moment”? Will American cable and satellite providers, nervous about controversy, listen to its potential audience?

After more than three decades at Canada’s public broadcaster, and now three years at another public broadcaster — Al Jazeera English — I certainly hope so. Public broadcasting means serving the public — the audience — not the advertiser.

In international terms, that means journalism that builds bridges among cultures. Helps people better understand the full story. Lowers the temperature when covering potentially explosive issues. And tries, however imperfectly, to give voice to the voiceless.

Daily journalism is history-on-the-run, and Al Jazeera is not flawless by any means. But we know that, and that’s an important start. I also believe the Obama administration understands that. I was part of a meeting in Doha a year ago when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated to Al Jazeera that, unlike the previous U.S. administration, it regards Al Jazeera as part of the “solution,” not the “problem.”

Al Jazeera English has been on the air since November 2006, and has won or been nominated for most major journalism awards in the world. It’s even widely watched in Israel.

Hopefully, in light of the coverage of Egypt, the next breakthrough for AJE will be the United States. That certainly is the next challenge.

Tony Burman, Al Jazeera’s head of strategy for the Americas, was managing director of Al Jazeera English from 2008-2010. He is a former editor-in-chief of CBC News.

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